


Because It's the Right Thing to Do

by Bright_Elen



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Brainwashing, Child Abuse, Conditioning, Cults, Essays, Fascism, Gen, Healing, Metafiction, Propaganda, mi trauma es su trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 04:15:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15064940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bright_Elen/pseuds/Bright_Elen
Summary: How Finn overcame First Order conditioning. Actual essay.





	Because It's the Right Thing to Do

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Finn Meta Week on Tumblr. Gets personal and dark, thus the tags.

Let’s start with the conditioning itself. The First Order wanted perfectly obedient, fanatically devoted Stormtroopers. To do this they chose not the enlisted grunts of the Empire, but used the most successful model of instilling loyalty from recent Galactic history: the Jedi.

Like the Jedi temple, the First Order took children at an age too young to remember their origins. Finn and the other abductees were probably raised in larger numbers than the Jedi younglings (though not as large as clone batches) but the methods were the same: the First Order taught the cadets exactly what they wanted them to know and fostered their desired personal qualities, and nothing else. [All they had to do was replace the Jedi Code with the First Order manifesto](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fstarwars.wikia.com%2Fwiki%2FStormtrooper_%28First_Order%29&t=NDEyYWVhM2ZhZmRkNTIwMWEyOGMzM2U0MGFkMTA5MzY4OThjOTdkNyw5MzU2NWY5OGU5Y2RmY2Q1N2ZlODhiMmYxNDU1MDQxOWJhNjdkNDAx).

You want soldiers ready to kill unarmed civilians on command, no questions asked? Teach them that the galaxy is chaos, everyone’s out for themselves, and Other anyone who isn’t part of the Order. That just takes information control and making the First Order a coherent, organized, homogeneous group. If you only know their way of thinking, and when everyone looks, sounds and behaves a certain way, any differences will be jarring and easily put someone into the ‘enemy’ category.

You want soldiers ready to die for the cause? Teach them that they’re taking up space and resources. That they aren’t special enough to justify the cost of their upkeep unless they’re fighting and/or dying for the First Order. That they will find glory, purpose, and worth in fighting and dying for the Order. Keep them from forming bonds with each other stronger than their loyalty to the Order itself. If they’re more attached to the group as an abstract, they won’t prioritize their comrades at inconvenient moments. Not to mention that if one of them goes off the rails, it will be a lot harder to bring others with them if they are unloved.

This, by the way, is one major place where the First Order lost Finn. If they’d let him bond with his fire squad the way he wanted, it would have been a lot easier to keep him on their side. They could have used the fact that Poe killed Slip to make Finn hate the Resistance. But they thought they could replace individual bonds with in-group status, not realizing that while the Jedi were all abstract ideals and non-attachment on paper, in practice it was relationships between individuals that kept the group coherent. The Jedi systematically misunderstood sentients’ need for relationships, and that carried over to the First Order when they copied their methods.

But back to information control, isolation, suppression of critical thinking and the in-group/out-group binary. Those tactics are effective in the real world, too. We see them in cults, authoritarian regimes, and abusive households. The GFFA might have hover cars and laser swords and space wizards, but people are still recognizably people. You don’t need hypertech or the Force to program people. Just raising them a certain way — or even taking a developed person and changing their way of life — is enough.

Well, most of the time. It wasn’t enough for Finn. But why?

Thinking about real-life scenarios of cultish indoctrination (or my own situation of a narcissistic mother) typically there are two possible results: one, the child grows up to be what they were molded into, whether that’s a Westboro Baptist goon or the favorite daughter now a narcissist herself. Option two, they grow up to be a wreck of a human being: no self-esteem, several mental illnesses, probably substance abuse, lots of stress- and trauma-induced medical conditions, probably a string of abusive relationships of various kinds. A lot of the people in this category die relatively young, often from suicide, overdose, or being killed by an abuser.

If the GFFA is like our world, that means probably most of the FO Stormtroopers became what was intended, but a sizeable fraction didn’t. They were the wrecks, and I imagine that the FO either executed or effectively lobotomized them as too much trouble.

But Finn. Finn managed to hide the fact that the conditioning didn’t fully work on him until he’d become smart and strong and brave enough to escape. Here's how he did it:

All survivors of cults/authoritarianism/child abuse/cultural oppression develop a false self. It’s the only way. When you’re punished for infractions like not thinking or emoting correctly, you learn real fast how to fake the correct emotions and thoughts and how to hide the forbidden ones. It’s oppressive but, in many cases, survivable.

There are basically two ways to have a false self. You’re either hyper-aware of everything always, like acting a part 24/7, your life on a tightrope. Or, you repress your forbidden self so well that even you aren’t aware it’s there, because it’s your entire fucking life, you gotta pace yourself and believing your own lies is more energy-efficient than knowing who you are.

It’s such a big lift because you need the false self to be ready for anything. It goes from the big lies — “The First Order is always right and good” or “I’m straight” or “my mother loves me” — all the way down to small ones like “I like breakfast sausage” and “I don’t mind walking the dog alone at night.” When someone else demands to define who you are, nothing is safe, no matter how small. So you lie and lie well.

But the truth still exists. You still exist, as do your feelings and preferences, even if you’re unaware of them. They can’t get air or light so they lie dormant in their seeds, but they’re there.

You hide them to avoid punishment, of course, but you’re also hiding them to keep them safe. Something in you won’t let them go. Won’t burn them out of yourself, no matter how much pressure you’re under to do so. I’ll never be sure why I didn’t. Maybe it was my subconscious hanging on to what little of myself I had. Maybe it was the empathy of teachers. Maybe divine intervention.

For Finn, I think it was the fact that his forbidden trait and his motivation for greatness were the same thing. You can’t cut off your own arm with the same hand (lightsabers notwithstanding), and he couldn’t use his desire to connect with others as fuel to destroy his ability to do so.

Keeping in mind that connection is his core motivation, let’s talk more about hiding. Before Jakku, Finn thought he wanted to truly belong in the First Order; we know that wasn't true because he later dropped the FO like a rock and wasn’t much invested in the Resistance, either. By contrast, his quick and strong feelings for Poe, Rey, and Han showed that Finn doesn’t want in-group status; he wants love and personal relationships, despite the First Order’s best efforts to replace his heart with a targeting computer. Wanting to belong was a story he told himself to stay ignorant of his disobedience and was still close enough to the truth that he could believe it.

Being able to think and say he was loyal to the First Order was his first step in hiding his true self. The next step was to become the fastest, strongest, smartest, most outwardly obedient Stormtrooper he could. Abused kids try to achieve their way out of the abuse all the time. Be what they want so you (1) get some scraps of affirmation and positive attention and (2), no one will look closely enough to see you’re deviant. Not even you.  

Now, Finn’s facade wasn’t perfect. His empathy was too great to hide completely. He was too kind to his fellow troopers and too reluctant to shoot unarmed civilians. His excellence prevented the top brass from noticing, but not the other Stormtroopers. That’s why they never gave him a nickname.

And that hurt. ‘Slip’ wasn’t just easier to say than FN-2003; it told people how he related to the rest of the group. It reflected at least part of his true self, whereas the alphanumeric designation did not. But Finn was only ever FN-2187, a non-name for a false self. It wasn’t that his comrades didn’t see his true self; it was that Finn’s true self was so alien to the First Order that they couldn’t contextualize it.

The other person Finn didn’t quite fool was Phasma. She also noticed his protectiveness over Slip and his refusal to murder, and if she’d been following protocol she’d have sent him to reconditioning a lot more often. But forced obedience usually means less creativity, less charisma, less initiative, and Phasma was reluctant to risk damaging Finn’s leadership skills when he could be an officer. Her arrogance and ambition led her to delude herself into thinking she could beat the empathy out of him but keep the rest. Finn saved himself by becoming too valuable to interfere with.

But preventing harm is just part of Finn overcoming his conditioning. What about the rest of his true self? How did he nurture it in the darkness for twenty-three years? The answer has to be ‘in tiny fractions of time in which he was safe to do so’ and also ‘indirectly.’

Given that the First Order played messages for the troopers to listen to in their sleep, they don’t strike me as the kind of organization that allowed much unstructured time. Stormtroopers would be on a strict schedule, but Finn could probably have taken an extra minute in the shower here or dragged out a solitary cleaning task there, just for some time away from the pressure.

But even with all that, Finn’s inner life, though heavily constrained by the maintenance of a false self, had some degree of freedom. Being behind a mask most of the time, he could make whatever facial expressions he wanted as long as his body language did what it was supposed to. During the mindless tasks of Sanitation he could daydream or fume about orders he didn’t like. If he hadn’t had some freedom of inner life, he couldn’t have developed a hatred of Phasma or been able to declare Han a war hero when the Order certainly wouldn’t have painted General Solo as such.

So those little bits of freedom helped him develop. But the indirect part, I think, could have been a deep involvement in fiction. We even have textual evidence: Finn knows what a boyfriend is.

He wouldn't have learned from his daily life of education, training and duty. Sure, there's sex in the First Order (hormone suppressants could change that but they throw off other body chemistry so they're really more trouble than they're worth), but for the overlords it's pretty easy to treat it like bathing or eating, a necessary function that can be enjoyable but is never, ever more important than duty. But permitting sex doesn't mean allowing intimate relationships. If having a brotherly bond with his squadmates was forbidden, having a romantic partner would have been even moreso.

Within such a restricted world, how did Finn learn about romance? I think that while the First Order would have liked to avoid spending Stormtrooper time on anything but duty, there's only so much pressure you can put on people before they break. They would have been forced to give the Stormtroopers some kind of R&R, and combining it with propaganda would at least make sure the time wasn't a total waste.

In addition to the messages played while Stormtroopers slept or ate, the litanies recited like clockwork, at least some of the propaganda had to have been holovids. I'd bet on action stories in which brave members of the First Order saved the galaxy; maybe even an enemies-to-lovers-to-allies in which a member of the FO fell for an ideological opponent, only to gradually win said opponent to the right side through the power of their devotion, parting ways in the end so as to best serve the Order. I picture Finn drinking in the holos and then, while mopping some already-gleaming hallway, imagining himself the hero, saving the girl and the day and mouthing the lines under his helmet: “because it’s the right thing to do.” Saving himself with fiction by re-humanizing himself and processing all of those forbidden emotions.

And finally, those holo-daydreams helped Finn develop the same imagination that got him out. No perfectly obedient Stormtrooper would have come up with the absolutely ludicrous plan to steal someone else’s armor and blaster, skip going to reconditioning, break Poe out of his holding cell, walk through a hangar full of soldiers, steal a TIE fighter in front of everyone, and then fly away while the huge-ass Star Destroyer shot its huge-ass cannon at them. What’s more, his creativity is what let him get away with it until they were leaving the hangar, because Phasma couldn’t imagine him defying orders or escaping. Who’d risk that when they’d be caught or killed immediately?

Someone desperate, yes. But more importantly, someone who nurtured, protected, and rescued himself, and then turned right around to do the same for others. Finn.

**Author's Note:**

> Want more discourse? I'm here: [bright-elen](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/bright-elen).
> 
> Sources:
> 
> Greg Rucka's Star Wars: Before the Awakening  
>  _The Force Awakens_
> 
> [Wookieepedia: Stormtrooper (First Order)](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Stormtrooper_\(First_Order\))  
> [Wookieepedia: Finn](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Finn)


End file.
